Students who take too long to earn bachelor's degrees are the frustration of parents, college leaders and policy makers alike -- who see the six-year bachelor's degree (or longer) as being more expensive for all involved, and particularly wasteful when many campuses are bulging due to increased enrollments.

SEATTLE -- A few years ago, gatherings of community college leaders commonly featured discussions of the unfairness and inaccuracy of using graduation rates to measure institutional success. There were no shortages of arguments to make: Many community college students don't want a degree, or they transfer before earning one, or they just wanted to take one course anyway, or they can only afford to take one course at a time.

WASHINGTON – Young adults are less likely to have earned a degree than their older counterparts, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution that gathers nearly a decade’s worth of data from the government's American Community Survey and foreshadows next year’s release of the 2010 Census.